


In the Woods Somewhere: A Marvel faerie tale

by spoffyumi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Antler Kink, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Reindeer Boys, bird boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:14:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8979259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoffyumi/pseuds/spoffyumi
Summary: The snap of a twig drew her attention.  A boy emerged from between the trees, black of hair, with dark paint across his eyes.  From either side of his forehead a pair of antlers branched out.

 
Recommended listening: "In the Woods Somewhere" by Hozier.





	

The fever took her in late summer, as the harvest moon waxed full.  From her bed she watched as it grew, larger and larger.  While her nursemaid applied cool cloths to her brow and fed her broth, the sky’s eye watched her, and called her name.

_Natalia._

When the moon reached its fullest, and all others in the great house slept, she slipped from the damp sheets and ran barefoot across the slick grass.  She had never been allowed beyond the vast manicured lawns, and then only with careful supervision.  Now, finally alone, the forest called to her. 

The midnight air cooled her burning skin.  She basked in the light of the moon, eyes closed, thinking of her mythology lessons, of Artemis, she who ruled the moon with her arrows and her bow.  Upon opening her eyes, she saw flashes of pale among the trees and, without thinking, gave chase.

The forest did not want her.  Fingers of thorn shredded her nightgown until it became ribbons of white fabric dangling from her wrists and neck.  Her desire to see the deer – for she had spied their antlers among the branches – won over the small cuts and her chastity.  Her fevered feet fled quick as any fawn.

Through the foliage she began to catch longer glimpses of the two she chased.  A long leg, pale and roped with taut muscle.  A foot muddied to the ankle. 

Soon, breathless, she stopped.  The moonlit clearing had a carpet of moss and a large, flat stone in the center.  She sat upon it and wondered at how tall the trees grew over her head.

The snap of a twig drew her attention. 

A boy emerged from between the trees, black of hair, with dark paint across his eyes.  From either side of his forehead a pair of antlers branched out.  She stared at the antlers more than the boy’s lean, luminous body, though her eyes did drift downward. 

He approached her warily.  She watched him, frozen, afraid to send him running away.  In her stillness he came closer, and closer still, until she could see the flawless sheen of his skin, until she could have reached out and touched his erect manhood.  Despite all her tutors and lessons, none had prepared her to see such a thing.  It was a sight as strange and beautiful as the boy’s antlers.

His hand reached out and touched her red curls. 

“What are you?” he asked, his voice low and musical. 

“A girl,” she answered.

He drew back at the sound of her voice.  “What is that?”

“It means she is female.”  This other voice has the same musical quality, a different timbre but something strikingly similar.  She turned to look.  This boy also had antlers, but his hair was fair.  He approached with less caution than the dark-haired boy.  “Her hair is red, like the fox. Are you a fox?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.  She felt wild and cunning like a fox.  “My name is Natalia.”

“Natalia,” repeated the dark-haired boy.

“Natalia,” agreed the fair-haired boy.

“Do you have names?” she asked.

They looked at one another with those odd eyes.  “Yes,” said the fair-haired boy.

She waited, and when they did not tell her, she asked them more directly.  “What are your names?”  She remembered reading fairy stories in her childhood, and in those stories a name, a true name, held tremendous power.  Perhaps, she thought, they would not give up a name so easily.  “What shall I call you?”

The fair-haired boy straightened.  “You may call me—”  He said something in a strange language, and she struggled to understand it.  It sounded like, “Steven.”

“Steven,” she laughed, for this was the name of her cousin, a deeply serious boy who would never have consorted with anyone who grew antlers.  “Steve.”

The boy corrected her with the strange language.  Then he repeated, “Steve,” and looked to the other boy.

“Steve,” said the dark-haired boy, and laughed.  Both boys laughed, the sound weaving among the trees.  Finally the dark-haired boy said, “I am called Bucky.”  This name fit better to a boy of the forest, a reindeer boy.

Bucky sat beside her on the flat rock, leaned forward, and touched her lips with his long fingers.  “Have you been eating the elderberries?”

“No,” she said. 

Next he touched her cheek, then brushed his fingertips over her eyelashes, which tickled and made her blink and smile.  Bucky's doe eyes, amidst the charcoal lining them, sparkled a crystalline blue.

"Green," Bucky announced.  "Like the grass and the leaves."

"Let me see," demanded Steve, shouldering Bucky out of the way.  The dark-haired boy took no offense, and rather allowed his friend to invade his space so that their bodies touched one another, Bucky's hands grazing Steve's waist where the sharply defined muscles pointed to the thatch of downy blond hair that crowned his penis.

Steve bent to look in her face, so close his nose rubbed hers, and she could feel the point of one of his antlers poking her forehead.  Steve had eyes bluer even than Bucky's, and long light brown lashes like Natalia had seen on horses.  His breath smelled like wild pine trees.

Never had a boy been so close before.  Natalia had often dreamed of such boys, of touching her lips to theirs.  Steve’s lips were so close she could feel his exhalation on her tongue.  Now she had a new desire, to latch her fingers around the boy’s antler, to tug on it, to feel its hardness in her hand and see how firmly it attached to his head. 

She crossed that small space, touched her lips to his, fit them together.  At the same time, she raised her hand and wrapped her hand around his horn.  It held tight, an extension of his skull, and when she pulled, it tilted his head, and their mouths opened to make a more perfect seal.  She felt the warmth of his tongue explore hers.  Her eyelashes drooped shut.  She could smell him ever more clearly now, the wild musky scent of him that wakened all her senses.

When he pulled away, her fingers falling away from his antler, she found herself panting for breath.  She had never known it might be this way.  The kisses shared by her parents had always been perfunctory, and then her father had gone off to war, and now her mother’s mouth was always set in a severe line.  Steve gazed at her face in wonder.

“She has no horns,” said Bucky, kissing Steve’s shoulder and resting his chin on the spot.  “And she has nothing down there.”

Natalia realized both boys now gazed down between her legs.  Instinctively, she pressed her legs together. 

“Females do not,” Steve said. 

“Pity,” Bucky said.  “It feels nice to touch.”  Looking at Natalia while he reached down and stroked Steve’s manhood, Bucky asked, “Do you miss it?”

“It feels nice to touch what I do have.”  Natalia barely felt appalled by the words which had fallen from her mouth.  She had never spoken of touching herself.  It was a secret act.  Sacred.  Cocking her head, she parted her legs once more. 

“I want to try,” Bucky said.  He sat beside Natalia so their thighs touched.  “Will you show me?”

He held out his hand, palm up. 

She took those long fingers with both hands, and guided them down, through the rents in her nightgown.  Grasping his fingers in hers, she pushed them into her special place.  No fingers but her own had never traveled there.  When his fingers twitched, she felt her thighs clench around their hands.  Her breast rose and fell, and dream-spelled eyes gazed at Bucky’s face.  He was looking down with utmost concentration. 

His fingers stroked the folds, all those secret places she did not know the names for.  She half-closed her eyes and a small moan escaped her lips.  When she refocused on Bucky’s face, his dark-shadowed eyes watched her face and smiled. 

“This is nice?  You like this?”

“Yes,” she whispered.  Her hips rocked against his fingers.  He pushed them deeper, and deeper still.  Her moans filled the night.

“I can fit in there, I think,” Steve said.

Natalia didn’t know what he was talking about.  Bucky’s touch had spelled her, and she allowed herself to be laid back on the rock, with its cushion of moss.  Her back arched with every movement inside her.  Why had no one ever told her about this? 

She felt hands on her knees, pushing them apart.  Bucky’s fingers withdrew.  She whined, and opened her eyes.  “Why did you stop?”  Then she saw Steve poised between her legs, and sat up.

Despite all she had never been told – the opposite of _keep your knees closed, button your blouse, avert your eyes when a gentleman speaks to you_ – she instinctively knew what this was, what they were about to do.  Perhaps it was the forest magic, the kind that brought reindeer boys out to play, that made her lay her head back, that grasped the cock of the fair-haired boy with antlers, and guided it between her legs. 

***

Later she could not marry the reindeer boys with any sort of reality – it all blurred into a fever dream, and no matter how she explained to her nursemaid about the crown of leaves in her hair or the dirt on her feet, the old woman shushed her and helped to the bath, removed her tattered gown, and scrubbed the forest out of her until it faded even from memory.

After the fever passed and she was well again, she sometimes found herself pausing at the mounted buck’s head in the hallway, the immense antlers looming over her.  Her father was a great hunter, and had lined the walls of the corridor with his conquests, but none stopped her in her tracks but the stag.

In her mind, she called him Bucky.  It was just a funny nickname, one she shared with her little cousins to make them giggle.

The winter came early that year, turned the ground to frost before the hunter’s moon.  Natalia did not mind the cold.  Each night the servants built up a fire in the hearth, and the thick blankets on her bed kept her warm.

One evening, on the last day of October, she watched her father ride off with his hounds and hunters.  The hooves of the horses pounded against the cold, hard ground like the devil’s own steeds, and she could still hear them hours later, when her nursemaid found her crying by the fire.  “I hope that fever did not return,” the woman said, laying her cool hands upon Natalia’s face.  “No, perhaps it is just your womanly courses, then.”

When the hoof beats thundered louder, Natalia ran to the windows.  Tears streamed down her face, dripping from her chin, as she watched the servants struggle with the carcass of a felled stag, a pure white hart with blood staining its breast.

“A great trophy,” they all said, all of Father’s friends, who stayed to celebrate the kill with many a glass of dark amber brandy.

Natalia could not sleep that night.  Her limbs felt like ice, and every time she closed her eyes, she saw those magnificent antlers, and something inside of her broke.

Was it part of her dream, then, when she woke to find herself standing before those antlers?  She could not bear to look beyond its neck, at the terrible wound that had killed it, at the gutting that had occurred at the hands of the servants.

A blink and she was running into the forest again.  Thick snow fell around her like fairy lights in the dark. If she had to think on it, her feet would have felt the cold.  Instead she ran, sprinted like the fox, and found herself in a familiar place.

In the center of the clearing, on a bed of frost-bitten grass, a black form huddled.  She drew back, clung to the trees for strength.  Where were her reindeer boys? she wondered, hardly comprehending the strange words that flickered through her mind. 

The black shape, person-sized, did not move save to shiver, nor did it threaten, and so she took a step forward and called out, “Hello, there.”  Her voice carried loudly in the frozen sky, so that it sounded like another girl returned her greeting: “Hello, there.”

Her words had stilled the strange creature.  More softly, she asked, “Who are you?”

A rustle, then a black face emerged from a mass of ebony feathers.  Natalia’s eyes had grown accustomed to the night now, and she could see the moon painting the contours blue-black and silver.

“I am Natalia,” she said.  “What are you called?”

The creature made no sound, though its eyes watched her every step.  Soon she could see the figure had the shape of a boy hidden beneath the large wings.  “Are you cold?” she asked, coming to crouch beside him.

The bird-boy scuttered back a little.

“I do not wish you harm.”  She held out a hand.  “Please, are you hurt?  Perhaps I could help you?”

The boy’s dark face looked over his shoulder.  When he spoke, his voice made a deeper music than she had expected.  “My wing is broken,” he said.

“Let me see.”

He winced as he sat up and moved his shoulder.  “I should not let you see.”  Shame filled his words.  “A broken bird is not a bird at all.”

“I am sure that is not true,” she said firmly, briefly touching his face before moving to the shoulder joint.

“There has been a great disturbance in the woods,” the bird-boy said.  His face twitched when she touched the light bones that anchored the wings to his back.  “Many have fallen this night.”

“I believe your wing is only dislocated,” she told him.  “Hold still.”

She herself had dislocated an arm once.  Holding hands with her mother, she had tripped, and Mother had yanked her to her feet to prevent a fall.  Later, after the nursemaid had noticed the way Natalia’s arm hung limp, the housemaster had set it to rights.  Natalia had watched the same procedure applied to one of the stableboys who had fallen from a horse.

With a firm hold of the wing bone, she pushed it back into place.  The bird-boy yelped and hopped away from her, drawing the injured wing to his chest.  “That hurt,” he accused.

“But it will heal properly now,” she said, sitting back on her heels.  “Do not try to fly right away, it will need some time.”

The boy stroked his feathers.

“ _Can_ you fly?” she asked. 

“Not now,” he pouted.  “You just told me I could not.”

She considered her words.  “Before you were hurt, could you fly?”

“Of course.”

A flying boy she would have liked to see, but this one seemed ornery.  She stood to go, feeling the cold in her limbs for the first time.  “A thank you would be nice,” she said.

“I did not ask for your help.”  As she began to walk away, he called after her, “I know someone who would ask.”

She stopped, inclined her head.

“You may call me Sam,” the bird-boy said, standing.  He could not have been much older than she, though his long, thin limbs might have deceived her.  His wings folded about him like feathery garments.  “Come, Natalia.  I will take you to him.”  He held out his hand.

She placed her palm against his, and he squeezed her fingers tightly, pulling her with great impatience.  Fairy folk did not often give thanks, she recalled from her stories, for that put them in debt.

Into the trees they went.  Natalia had memory of branches scratching and barring her way, but alongside Sam the trees allowed her to pass unharmed.

Up, the trail climbed up, until her legs burned and the soles of her feet bled.  “How much further?” she asked several times, never receiving an answer.

A rocky mountainside rose up beside them.  Natalia looked back only once, to find a dizzying view of her bloodied footprints quickly disappearing beneath the powdery snow.  Far away, like a tiny landscape in a snow globe, sat the manor house she called home.

“Come,” was the only thing Sam said to her, tugging her along, pulling her up slick rock faces, until the wind whipped her hair into her face and her nightdress beat against her legs.

“Here,” he said finally.

Through the flurry of snow, she saw a preternatural glow.  Her fingers left Sam’s.  The light drew her like a moth to a flame, though this was no flame.  The blue light emanated from a glass box, a solid chunk of ice framed by thick tree roots.  When she came close enough, she saw that the ice had trapped a boy, and rising from the boy’s fair hair was a crown of antlers.

A coffin of ice was what it was, and at its side, covered in drifting snow, was the dark-haired reindeer boy.  His face and hands pressed against the frozen surface, a dangerous blue tinge to his lips.  His eyes fluttered open, the blue color she recalled washed into gray.

“Help him,” he moaned.  “Please, help him.”

Natalia stood looking down through the veins of frozen water.  The fair-haired boy lay unmoving and still, as if in an enchanted sleep.

“How?”  She imagined it would be a kiss that would wake him, or a maiden’s song, or perhaps a love spell chanted at the midnight hour.

Through cracked lips Bucky replied, “He wants a pound of flesh.”

"A pound of flesh," she repeated.  "Who wants it?" she asked, but he did not, or could not, answer.

"The Frost King." Sam spoke at her side.  "He who rules the dying time."

"What pound of flesh should he want?"

"A pound of flesh, no more, no less," was all Sam said.

"Could this flesh come from anyone?"

"You would have to ask the Frost King himself."

"Where might I find him?"

"In the thickest snow, in the chillest wind, in a finger of ice trailing o'er your skin."

At those words, she truly felt the cold that had surrounded her all this time.  “We must protect them,” Sam said, and looked around wildly.  He picked up a fallen branch and held it out as thunder shook the ground. 

“What is happening?” she whispered, but was shushed.

From behind Sam’s outstretched wing, she could only feel the cold of a shadow crossing over them.  Whatever cast this shadow was many feet taller than a man, and breathed like a bull.

“You cannot take him,” Sam said loudly, brandishing his stick.

A grunt, and then Sam was gone, flung into a snowbank. 

Natalia was left facing the massive beast.  This creature had skin of green, bulging with thick muscle.  She kept looking up and up and did not see his face.

The creature bellowed at her, and she hid her eyes, certain she would be flung aside like Sam.  But when she felt the air around her suddenly warm, and she lowered her hands, she saw that the beast had gone, disappeared.  He had taken with him the reindeer boy called Bucky.

“What was that?” she asked, running to Sam to help him up.  “Where has he taken Bucky?”

“I have failed.”  Sam’s shoulders and wings drooped, and he refused to get up.  “I was meant to protect them.”

Natalia did not understand and said so.

“They are the light and the dark.  The sun and the moon.  Without both, we will perish.”

The fair-haired reindeer boy said nothing.

"I tire of your riddles, crow,” Natalia said.  “Take me to this Frost King, else this boy will die too.  I will give him the pound of flesh."

"I would do as you wish, but I cannot fly." 

Natalia put her hands on her hips, and then Sam whistled, loud and clear, a trill Natalia had never heard from a human whistle.  “One of my brothers can take you,” he said while they waited. 

“Why were your brothers not here to help you fight?” she asked.

“The Frost King has killed most of the flock, and imprisoned others.  Hawkeye is our archer.  He sees best from a distance.”

At the sound of his name, another bird boy flew down, landing lightly on his bare feet.  This one had fair skin and hair the color and texture of hay.  He was larger than Natalia, but smaller than Sam, with white wings tipped in shiny purples and blacks.  He carried a bow, and had a quiver of feather-tipped arrows – his own feathers, it seemed – strapped across his bare chest.

“Can he carry me?” she asked doubtfully.  She could see why this one might not have fought directly against the great beast she had seen.

The bird boy’s shoulders squared up at the offense. 

“Hawkeye is strong, and he sees far,” Sam answered. 

Still, Natalia waited, unsure of how to approach.  Would she ride upon his back, or would he carry her as a groom might carry a bride over the threshold?  Hawkeye stepped forward, slinging the bow across his chest as he did, and swept her up as if she weighed nothing.  Instinctively she clung to his neck.  He smelled of soaring skies.

“She wishes to parlay with the Frost King,” Sam told Hawkeye.

The fair-haired boy looked down at her.  This close, she could see the little cuts that marred his skin.  “You are either very brave, or very ignorant,” he said.

“Would you not want to help your friends?” she asked, gesturing to Bucky and Steve.

She expected him to ask what a simple girl might do, a girl without magic or wings or even antlers, but he did not.  He simply crouched down, spread his wings, and jumped into the air. 

The cold air pricked at her eyes and made breath difficult, but then she opened her eyes and her bodily comforts no longer concerned her.  They were flying.  Wisps of cloud brushed her cheeks.  The forest below appeared both small and vast.

Hawkeye wheeled through the sky.  Not for long, though, as he soon began to descend.  Circling, he brought them down in a clearing near a cave.  “Is this where the Frost King lives?” she asked.  She had imagined an ice-covered fortress, not a rocky hole.

“You will need weapons if you are to be our champion,” Hawkeye said.

“Champion?” Natalia echoed.  “I’m no champion.”

“You must be, if you are to fight the Frost King.”

“I know nothing of fighting.”  Natalia laughed.  “I am but a girl!  I am trained in embroidery and needlework.  I am trained to dance and find a husband.”

The bird boy’s eyes had widened.  “These sound like dangerous work.”

She thought of the hours of plies and the thousands of needle pricks she had endured, the hours it took to ready herself for mixed company.  “Perhaps.”

Hawkeye gestured to the cave.  “I cannot enter,” he said, and so she ducked and entered the darkness, feeling her way with hands on the cold stone walls.

Her eyes began to adjust almost instantly.  Then she understood that it was not her night vision, but rather a glow coming from deep inside.  A golden light emanating from what seemed to materialize out of nowhere: piles of gold coin, jewels, armor plates, chalices, a shield.  She saw a quiver of golden arrows and a longbow, a crested helm and a battle axe.

She approached the armor reverently.  She had never seen metalwork so delicate, despite her father’s attention to detail in the great house.  Flowers and thorns adorned the plates, which even seemed shaped to a womanly form.  Her fingers reached to touch it, and then light blinded her.  She looked down and saw a warrior.  The armor protected her chest and back, and chain mail hung like a skirt.  Her nightgown peeked from the bottom.  She looked like Artemis, and immediately she reached for the quiver of arrows, the weapons of that ancient goddess.

She paused when two daggers caught her eye.

When she emerged from the cave, she knew Hawkeye would still be waiting for her.  And he was.

***

Natalia pressed her smile into Hawkeye’s neck as he carried her up over the trees.

She had no idea, really, what she looked like – the cave did not have a mirror – but she saw her reflection in the bird boy’s eyes.  She looked powerful, fierce, wild, and beautiful.  She had rendered him speechless.  The knowledge kept her warm as the air grew colder.

This time, when they landed, Natalia saw a thorny castle there.  It tricked her eyes, made her think it just a tangle of barren trees and stone, until she looked it head on and the shapes resolved.

“Where is the door?” she asked.

“What is a door?” Hawkeye responded. 

“The entrance,” she explained.  “How are we to get inside, to the court of the Frost King?”

“We are already inside,” he said.

She looked around.  Now the trees around her twisted into walls.  Her breath caught.  They were trapped, ensnared like the limp foxes and rabbits her father sometimes caught.  But she did not see any king here, nor servants.  She stomped her numb foot against the ground.  She turned her face into the wind.  "I demand to speak to the Frost King!" she bellowed.

"No need for such shouting," came a smooth, low voice at her back, and she whirled around.

The Frost King stood smirking, his long ebony locks crowned with smooth golden horns.  Elegant blue hands were all to be seen of the rest of him, as he was draped in an enormous white fur coat that trailed upon the ground.  "You are a pretty thing," he purred, and reached to touch her hair.

She jerked away.  "I demand to know why you have imprisoned the reindeer boy.”

“Reindeer boy?”  The Frost King laughed.  “You are a delightful creature.  Be my bride, and I will tell you.”

Instead of fulfilling her desire to look at him coldly and refuse, she recalled her lessons.  “Y-your bride?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her gold-armored chest.  This was how she would be expected to respond to a marriage proposal at her debut. 

The Frost King sank to one knee, and bowed his head slightly.  “I should be honored.”

This was a careful game she would have to play.  “I have only come to offer you a pound of flesh.”  She removed one of the gold daggers from her waistband and held it to her inner arm.

A hand on the hilt stopped her before she could make a cut.  “Dear lady, please.  I cannot allow your beauty to be sullied by scars.”  She re-sheathed the dagger.  “Please, walk with me.” 

She glanced back at Hawkeye before nodding agreement.  The Frost King’s elbow, when she held it, seemed to numb her whole arm.  He led her to a wall of trees, which parted for him and wove back into a wall after they had passed through.  Natalia worried for Hawkeye left behind.

“Lady, I have seen you in your great house,” the Frost King said. 

“You have?”  Though her voice displayed surprise, she understood the cold that had surrounded the house better now. 

“One from a great family such as yours would be a good match for a king such as myself,” he continued.  “Your father works against the forces of light, the forces that would destroy me.”

She had known this too, from the death of the white hart and from the uniforms worn by her father’s important friends.  The insignia emblazoned on their armbands meant death for so many.

“In you, I have found my true mate,” the Frost King finished, as they entered a clearing in the center of which was a large stone slab.  The dark-haired reindeer boy lay upon it, skin waxy beneath tangled vines that gripped his arms and legs and tethered them in place.  “Once I have extracted my pound of flesh, I will be free to rule over all.”

Considering this tableau, she lifted her chin.  “I would be happy to be your bride, but I have one condition.”

“Anything for you, my lady.”

“I wish to slay the reindeer boy.”

Slowly, the Frost King smiled.

***

She was escorted away to prepare for the ceremony.  The Frost King wished for them to be married at once.

Servants clothed only in furs and animal skins brought her a crown of ice, and offered her a chalice of dark liquid.  She accepted it graciously but set it aside after pretending a sip that barely touched her lips.  One did not eat or drink anything in the fae courts, that was common knowledge.  She was also offered a robe made of fox tails, but this too she refused.  She was draped in jewels made from ice and flowers frozen in dew.  Heavily she made her way to the Frost King’s side, in front of the slab where Bucky was held captive.

Before them a crowd had gathered, wearing headdresses of branches and leaves that made them appear as trees at first glance.  She saw bird people in chains, but not her Hawkeye.  She could only hope he had not given up on her, and was watching from a distance.  Drawing in a deep breath, she held herself as the princess the Frost King believed her to be as he began to speak to his court. 

The Frost King spoke of a time before light, when he and his followers had free reign, when sacrifices were made in their honor.  He spoke of how the sun had poisoned the world, and resigned them to the shadows.  “We are forgotten for half the year,” he lamented.  “Today is the day of the solstice, when darkness reigns longer than light.  And this is the way it shall stay, with this sacrifice to the gods!”

The crowd cheered, in the way that the wind might howl through the trees, a screeching, keening wail.  Natalia could not decide whether this was a cry of victory or one of despair.

“Lady, I trust you to extract the pound of flesh.”

Natalia looked over the ground as she withdrew her dagger and raised it up over her head.  “I am a sister to the night,” she announced.  “I am the teeth of the fox tearing through the jugular.”

Bucky’s eyes fluttered open.  He looked up at her in confusion.

“I am the cold finger of ice on your neck, and my words are the silk of the spider’s web.” 

She lifted the dagger even higher, and Bucky’s eyes opened wider.  Instead of bringing the dagger down to sever Bucky’s proffered arm, she swung sideways and buried the blade to the hilt in the Frost King’s side.

He staggered back only one step, and looked down at the betrayal before backhanding her. As she hit the ground, she saw a dark shape swooping out of the sky.  An arrow buried itself in the Frost King’s chest.

The crowd below was thrown into chaos, as the followers tried to flee, and the prisoners broke loose to attack.  Natalia ignored the pain in her face and rolled to her feet.  She unsheathed her other dagger and began to cut loose the vines that bound Bucky to the altar.  Before she could release more than the arm she had expected to sever, she felt the ground tremble and the giant from earlier appear.

She turned, not to flee, but to see how Hawkeye fared against the Frost King.  The blue-skinned fae appeared barely injured as he held the bird boy by the throat.  Hawkeye’s legs kicked uselessly.

Light was the Frost King’s weakness, she now knew from his speech.  Light and the sun.  There was no sun to be had here, not with the forest trees weaving a ceiling which blocked out the moon.  Unless… she turned back to the giant, and called to him.

As the giant crashed toward them, he broke through the branches.  Now she could see the moon.  The moon was a reflection of the sun, and her armor could then reflect the moon.  She felt the gold plates drink in the moonlight.  Her gold dagger, too.  It glowed and caught the Frost King’s gaze, moments before she drove it through his heart.

***

She awoke in a snowdrift, snowflakes caught in her eyelashes.  She had no armor, no crown of ice.  Rather, she felt warm.  The first fingers of the sunrise pointed through the trees.  She sat up, and saw that she was rolled up in a fur blanket, and a campfire warmed her face.

Her nursemaid huddled by the flames.  When she saw that Natalia was awake, she gave a little cry of relief.  “Oh, thank the Lord!  I thought the fever had come back.”

“What’s going on?” Natalia asked, plucking a thorny vine from her hair.

“They came to arrest your father, and your mother too.  Spies, both of them.  Your mother asked me to take you away and hide you, but you were not in your bed.  I ran out with just a few things, some food and this blanket, and followed your footprints.  At first I thought you were dead.” The nursemaid hugged Natalia to her bosom.

So much had happened, and she did not know if any of it was real. 

In the days that followed, she and her nursemaid continued through the forest.  “There is a river,” her nursemaid told her, and they could follow it to a village where her sister lived.  “We will hide there until the war is finished.”

When a hawk or falcon soared overhead, Natalia wondered if it was Sam or Hawkeye or another of the bird boys.  And each night, Natalia dreamed that she could see reindeer boys running free through the forest. 


End file.
